SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150, lists at 11% premium to IPO price; Musk becomes world's first trillionaire

Shares of Elon Musk's SpaceX made a healthy debut on Nasdaq on June 12, listing at $150 apiece, an 11% premium to its issue price of $135. The listing marked Wall Street's largest public offering in history and gave the rocket maker a market valuation of approximately $1.96 trillion.

Although the shares debuted below Wall Street expectations, they quickly gathered momentum and climbed to $164 apiece, representing a gain of nearly 20% over the IPO price of $135.

Analysts had expected the stock to debut between $170 and $175 per share, supported by the strong demand witnessed during the record-breaking offering.

Following its debut, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is officially known, immediately became the sixth largest publicly listed company in the US. It also emerged as the first of three anticipated "megacap" companies to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to follow.

Meanwhile, SpaceX's listing on Wall Street pushed Elon Musk's fortune past the $1 trillion mark, making him the world's first trillionaire.

The listing has not only earned Musk the trillionaire tag but is also set to benefit more than 4,400 current and former employees of the rocket company, as the stock's strong debut could propel many of them into millionaire status, according to a report by The New York Times.

An earlier report by Bloomberg estimated that more than 3,000 of these employees reside in the Texas town where SpaceX's facilities are located.

Musk's space giant eyes AI-driven future

Co-founded by Musk in 2002, SpaceX evolved itself from a focus on rocket launches and providing satellite broadband internet to an aspiring AI juggernaut, whose deals providing computing infrastructure to Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google for as much as $2.17 billion a month are set to become its biggest source of revenue, as per the Bloomberg report.

SpaceX started as a reusable rocket manufacturer, but the company's most profitable business today is its Starlink satellite internet division. SpaceX also acquired Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI, which itself acquired social media platform X in 2025. Musk originally purchased the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022.

Elon Musk made his fortunes by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.

SpaceX had a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion. To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business.

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